Goddess Of Mud And Flesh

It was a cold and shivering night on the last day of December in Anno Domini 1980. A young and frail woman in tattered clothes stood at the edge of the water of the Kumortuli Bathing Ghat on the banks of the River Hooghly in India’s Calcutta city. Close to her tormented bosom, she held tightly her three-day-old newborn baby. Ragini had taken the cruel decision of leaving her infant girl on the riverbank at the mercy of the Mother Goddess Ganges. She believed that a tortured and bonded prostitute should never raise a girl child. She thought that it was perhaps better for her baby to die in the river than grow up on the streets of Asia’s largest red-light district.

Located on the eastern banks of the River Hooghly in North Calcutta, between Sovabazar and Beadon Street, with hundreds of multi-storey brothels housing over fifty thousand Nepali, Assamese…